Do you know who your ideal customer is? How old are they? Do they have school-age children? What are they doing in their free time? How much money do they make a year? How do they access their emails?

All those questions might seem unrelated to your business. But put together, they could tell a really powerful story. The story that should guide how you should design your website, in what social media platform to invest in and even guide your product development. The story that could pull all your marketing efforts together into one cohesive, powerful Inbound Marketing strategy.

5 Core Benefits From Well-Defined Buyer Personas

This all sounds like a very vague and scary concept. But before we look at how to define your own ideal customer, let us look at the concrete benefits that the definition of buyer personas can have for your organization:

When a certain repeat customer walks into your store, you know what he wants to buy. You know his taste, why he buys what he buys. Customer personas are similar. They are just not one specific person but a semi-fictional representation of your IDEAL customer. It allows you to pin point exactly what your ideal customer likes, dislikes, where they hang out and how they communicate.

Find out more about the customer as a person. How do they like to spend their time off? What hobbies do they have? What kind of person are they? How do they relate to or communicate with others?

Find out what their pain points are. Why are they buying your products? What problems are they trying to solve with it? Are there related problems that you could address? What educational content would they appreciate?

Reason #2: More Targeted Communication

Once you defined your customer persona, you will be able to leverage some powerful insights. For example, now it is easier to translate your products features into benefits that resonate with your customers. Ben Hunt, a very clever marketer, said in his book Convert!: No one wants to buy a quarter-inch drill. They need to buy a quarter-inch hole. And it's true.

You can learn more about their "language" or industry slang and use their language to engage with them. Your email marketing, the blog posts and other content on your website should reflect this. This over time will enable you to build a closer relationship with them, because they feel that you understand them. If they feel understood, they are more likely to see as a likable authority.

Reason #3: Build Better Customer Relationships

Once you know more about the background of each of your customer personas, you will be able to determine how your customers are spending their time online and how they access the internet. This allows you to target the right social networks.

It might be necessary for your business to have a mobile responsive website. Maybe your customer relies heavily on business listing websites for reviews. And you can provide them with useful content by blogging tailored exactly to their needs. For example, according to HubSpot, personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14%, and conversion rates by 10%. (Source: Aberdeen Group)

Reason #4: Better Leads, Happy Customers

Now you understood your customer needs and interests, you are better able to have a 1:1 communication and build better, stronger relationships. Now you will have better, pre-qualified leads that are looking to learn more about your product and eventually buy it.

Now you can take those leads and turn them into happy customers and finally into enthusiastic promoters of your brand. Inbound Marketing tools like email marketing, webinars, and quality content are a great way to do that.

Reason #5: Consistency across several marketing channels & Reporting

Traditionally you would measure your success of your Google Ad Words Pay-Per-Click advertisement or that new Facebook campaign. Now that you orient your marketing efforts by your buyer persona, you are able to measure across multiple platforms the results of diverse efforts. You can measure, tweak and improve constantly.

In the next blog post, we will focus on how to define a buyer persona.

Now over to you: Does your have a buyer persona that you focus one? Or several?